Forget the Spoonful of Sugar: It’s Uncle Walt, Uncensored

BURBANK, Calif. — In the coming movie “Saving Mr. Banks,” a comedic drama about the turbulent making of “Mary Poppins” in the 1960s, Walt Disney acts in a very un-Disney way. He slugs back Scotch. He uses a mild curse word. He wheezes because he smokes too much.

The real shocker? Walt Disney Studios made the film.

“Saving Mr. Banks,” which stars Tom Hanks as the mustachioed founder of the Walt Disney Company and Emma Thompson as the cantankerous novelist P. L. Travers, is a small movie that cost less than $35 million to make. But its existence says something big about Disney: despite its well-earned reputation for aggressively managing its image, it can get out of the way and let filmmakers lead.

“Wow, this was so not the battle I anticipated,” said Alison Owen, the independent producer behind “Saving Mr. Banks,” which also pokes fun at Disney’s sometimes-syrupy brand of entertainment. “Disney behaved impeccably.”

Every studio is controlling, but Disney, with its vast merchandise and theme park divisions, has a particular reputation in Hollywood — fairly or not (and the studio argues not) — for having a more narrowly focused and synergistic approach to filmmaking. In recent years the studio has made some headway in courting leading live-action writers and directors, but some still self-edit: Disney will never make this movie, so let’s not even try.

Those involved in “Saving Mr. Banks,” which closes the London Film Festival on Sunday, were nervous even after the script was successfully lobbed over the Disney transom. Would the company try to turn the film into a type of corporate video?

“I was a bit afraid because we wanted to be honest about Walt,” said the director, John Lee Hancock, who chose the film as his follow-up to “The Blind Side” (2009). “I imagined the moment when Disney would say, ‘Sorry, we like him better as a god than a human.’ To their credit, they were smart enough and brave enough to realize that a human Walt was not only a better character, but was easier to love.”

Mr. Hancock gently added, “Sometimes somebody else can tell you more about your father than you can.”

“Saving Mr. Banks,” which does not arrive in theaters until Dec. 13 but is already generating serious Oscar buzz, in particular for Ms. Thompson, got its start at Disney one evening in November 2011. Sean Bailey, the studio’s president for production, received a call from a lieutenant, Tendo Nagenda. There was a script, written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith outside the Disney system, that required immediate attention. It was very good, Mr. Nagenda advised, but it also potentially touched a third rail: Walt Disney was a lead character.

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Walt Disney around 1950.CreditHulton Archive/Getty Images

“It very quickly went all the way to the top,” Mr. Bailey said, referring to Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chairman and chief executive. The company swiftly considered all of its options. One of them was to buy the script simply to park it, so that the movie’s portrayal of Walt Disney never reached theaters.

“Do we buy it defensively?” Mr. Bailey said in an interview, describing the discussions at Disney headquarters here. “Do we say we’re not going to buy it, but it could be difficult for you if you take it anywhere else? Or do we buy it and make it?”

Mr. Iger, who has made balancing Disney’s heritage with innovation one of his hallmarks, asked what the studio saw in the script. Boring into Disney bedrock was worth the risk, the movie team responded, because the project hit on multiple themes. On its surface, “Saving Mr. Banks” is about the lengths Walt Disney went to for “Mary Poppins.” But it also serves as “an exploration of storytelling, why storytelling matters in the world, and how storytelling can change people’s lives,” Mr. Bailey said.

It is also about coming to terms with one’s past, he added.

Mr. Iger signed off and went an unusual step further, personally calling Mr. Hanks to ask him to consider the Disney role. “We have never depicted Walt before, so you can imagine how much trust was needed,” Mr. Bailey said.

Mr. Hanks and Disney’s studio chairman, Alan F. Horn, in turn went to meet with Diane Disney-Miller, Walt Disney’s sole surviving child. A spokeswoman for Mrs. Miller, who is 79, said she was unavailable for an interview because of “medical issues.” But she might be pleased: For years, Mrs. Miller has worried that her father has become too much of a corporate mascot, even going as far as to open a museum aimed at depicting his human side.

“My kids have literally encountered people who didn’t know that my father was a person,” Mrs. Miller, who with her husband, Ronald, has seven children, said at the museum’s 2009 opening.

It will be a busy couple of months for her father, who died in 1966. An unrelated Disney film project, the new animated short film “Get a Horse,” arrives in November attached to the full-length feature “Frozen” and uses his old voice recordings for Mickey Mouse’s lines.

But while “Get a Horse” is an overt celebration of the studio’s heritage, “Saving Mr. Banks” at times lampoons the company’s style. “I won’t have her turned into one of your silly cartoons,” Ms. Thompson’s character says of Mary Poppins. No, she says, a visit to Disneyland would not change her mind; in fact, she would be “sickened” to visit that “dollar-printing machine.”

And in one scene that has gotten big laughs in early screenings, Ms. Thompson’s cranky writer arrives at her hotel for meetings with Walt Disney to find her room stuffed with balloons, caramel corn and toys. Shoving a stuffed Mickey Mouse into a corner, she snaps, “You can stay there until you learn the art of subtlety.”

Life imitated art last year when Ms. Thompson arrived for filming and found that Disney had done the same thing to her hotel suite. “Believe it or not,” Mr. Bailey said with a twinkle in his eye, “we do have a sense of humor.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Forget the Spoonful of Sugar: It’s Uncle Walt, Uncensored. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe